Providing data storage for alumni e-folios
With graduation approaching, many of our students are saying goodbye to under-graduate status and getting used to being alumni. This includes some of our myFolio focus group members. The EAT PDP project wants these alumni to carry on using myFolio for personal development and to continue to update their e-folios. So we need to ensure these users still have access to myFolio after graduation. Most HEI’s allow a period of grace beyond graduation during which access to IT services is still available but after this time alumni IT accounts are suspended. At Kent we continue to provide a full email service to our recent alumni but all other services are terminated a few weeks after graduation.
Mahara, the open source software that myFolio is based on, provides extensions which facilitate several different forms of authentication. Kent currently uses LDAP authentication fortunately we have an agreement that access via this method will continue for our focus group members for at least the next year. This year we are only dealing with a handful of alumni who will need continued access to myFolio but in September 2011, Kent will make the software available to all students. At the end of summer term 2012 we will have up to four thousand students graduating and leaving the University. Do we give these graduates access to myFolio beyond graduation or leave them with a dump of their data and let them find an alternative? Most people working in the field of learning research and development would like to see access continue. A HESA report issued just this week found that very nearly 10% of graduates were unemployed six months after graduation. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association for Graduate Recruiters is quoted as saying, in response to the report, “These days a good degree is not enough to guarantee a graduate a decent job. I am the first to acknowledge the growing emphasis in our universities to improve the employability of students. The challenge is to get the students to treat their own employability seriously.”
If Higher Education is to do everything possible to help find appropriate employment for graduates then the post-graduation access to e-folio and personal development software like Mahara should surely be on the agenda.
It is hard to predict what percentage of students will wish to continue to use myFolio beyond graduation but there is no doubt for Kent that this would have implications for the size of the LDAP directory. The details on how long we offer access to myFolio beyond graduation – if at all – are yet to be decided. It might be possible in order to to keep the number of LDAP entries down, to ‘weed out’ alumni who never access myFolio. Even so if we provide alumni access to this service, over even a short period of time the number of ‘live’ accounts is going to grow considerably. This is obviously an issue for IT staff but probably not that big an issue and associated costs are not likely to be too large.
Providing storage space is more controversial because there will be a bigger cost attached – even with the much reduced cost of storage we now enjoy. Currently we offer myFolio users 50Mb of space – not a huge amount but a useful amount if users take advantage of Mahara’s linking and embedding facilities especially for large files such as video and graphics. But multiply that by 4000 and you are looking at a figure just shy of 200Gb. Every year. Again that may not seem like a lot of data but we have to bear in mind that the figure will continue to increase as long as Kent keeps producing graduates. Not all alumni will continue to use Mahara and of those that do all will not use all the storage available to them so the storage needs will be lower. One of the challenges for Kent will be making an accurate prediction of our users’ storage needs – another one will be deciding how we fund that cost. The EAT-PDP project will report on this issue in the near future.